In Paris, Smart Manufacturing Editor in Chief Brett Brune interviews Stéphane Lannuzel, chief digital officer for Operations at L’Oréal.Stéphane, what is happening with the standard production cycle for a product? How does it impact manufacturing at L’Oréal, and how is your team dealing with it?The digital transformation of L’Oréal Operations is really led by our Read More

Early next year, Samag will deliver multi-spindle machining centers for an Asian maker of commercial vehicles, CEO Roland Emig said, declining to identify the customer. To get the contract, Samag partnered with Symacon, which provides a system for automating the transfer of parts from one place to another.The customer in Asia “asked a turnkey project,” he said. “That’s part Read More

NEUHAUS AM RENNWEG, Germany—To date, GBneuhaus has only produced its nanotech-enabled coatings in this small village in the state of Thuringia. But that’s about to change: The 28-year-old firm in June founded a company in Pune, India, and will soon begin producing its antimicrobial coating there, Managing Director Michael Petry said.“We have the first customer in India who Read More

Cofounder Johannes Trabert, who lives a poetic life in the Thuringian Forest, says the future will be focused on ‘the clever share of work’ between humans and robots.
ILMENAU, Germany—Johannes Trabert’s voice carries repose as he zips past the construction site for the latest Fraunhofer institute (plunked down alongside relics of East German industry here) in Read More

PARIS—With the speed of manufacturing being what it is in 2018, the level of attention humans can maintain for hours at a time is a problem—for which there are solutions. IBM’s cognitive assistant is one. Scortex’s two-year-old Quality Intelligence Solution is another.Scortex CEO Aymeric de Pontbriand commonly relays this tale from one of his first customer’s experience Read More

PARIS—When Airbus wanted to develop a smart machine or a robot with tons of artificial intelligence inside for a specific task, it used to as a matter of course turn to a startup. That takes one or two years. But this year, Airbus put into production smart machines it developed in about eight months with Akeoplus—to make parts for the A320, said Stéphane Morel, Read More